Abigail Thompson

Abigail A. Thompson (born in 1958, in Norwalk, Connecticut) is an American mathematician. She works as a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis, where she specializes in knot theory and low-dimensional topology.

Thompson graduated from Wellesley College in 1979, and earned her Ph.D. in 1986 from Rutgers University under the joint supervision of Martin Scharlemann and Julius L. Shaneson. After visiting positions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of California, Berkeley, she joined the UC Davis faculty in 1988.

Thompson won the 2003 Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics for her research extending David Gabai's concept of thin position from knots to 3-manifolds and Heegaard splittings. In 2012, she became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.

Thompson has also been an activist for reform of primary and secondary school mathematics education. She has publicly attacked the Mathland-based curriculum in use in the mid-1990s when the oldest of her three children began studying mathematics in school, claiming that it provided an inadequate foundation in basic mathematical skills, left no opportunity for independent work, and was based on poorly written materials. As an alternative, she founded a program at UC Davis to improve teacher knowledge of mathematics, and became the director of the California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science, a month-long summer mathematics camp for high school students.

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